Thursday, June 27, 2019

8.2 Nazjatar

World of Warcraft released patch 8.2, Rise of Azshara, this week. It introduced two new zones, Nazjatar and Mechagon. You go to Nazjatar first. I haven't really started Mechagon, so these are just impressions of Nazjatar.

Nazjatar is an interesting zone. The story line unlocks a faction which you ally with. For Alliance, it's the Waveblade Ankoan, who are basically fish-men. There are a lot of quests, and things to find and unlock.

Gameplay-wise, the zone is a combination of dailies and world quests, which actually work fairly well together. A lot of the dailies are more general, like "kill 15 Naga", which you can do anywhere on the island. You also choose one of three Ankoan companions who fight alongside you, and have three specific daily quests to level up. So you try to do dailies and World Quests at the same time, completing the dailies on the way to and from the World Quests.

I chose the hunter companion, who honestly comes across as a bit emo. I think I'll try the shaman next.

The combination of having some quests which are tied to a specific location, and others which are more general, is very good. It allows you to play a mini-optimising game with your quests each day.

There's also lots of puzzle quests in Nazjatar. Everyone was complaining about this one where you have to rescue someone by bouncing on jellyfish. I thought it was pretty easy, as I one-shot it. Maybe it was beginner's luck, but all you need to do is turn and face the next platform/jellyfish as you are being bounced.

Nazjatar also has Benthic armour, which you can buy and upgrade with the currency found in the zone. I'm not entirely certain if it's something a raider should pursue, or if it's mostly for solo players, alts, and filling in holes. I blew most of my currency on fixing an Abyssal device, which doesn't seem to do anything, but might be used in crafting later. So gear is mostly moot for me at this point.

One thing is that the armour is random, but whatever stats it has is maintained as it upgrades. So it's possible that the ideal is gambling until you get a piece with the best secondaries and a socket, and then upgrading that. The initial armour is very cheap as well, which lends itself to this strategy.

Edit: Apparently the secondaries and special Benthic bonuses are fixed for each item slot. All belts have the same secondaries and Benthic bonus, etc. So if you want to gamble, it's really only for tertiary stats like leech and sockets.

Second Edit: Apparently the above is not quite right. Some slots have multiple "types" of Benthic armor. Each type has specific secondaries and bonuses. Like there are three different plate legs.

All in all, Nazjatar is a pretty interesting zone, with a variety of activities. It should be interesting to see how things unfold, especially as there is a second zone to balance it out.

I'm not certain they've ever applied this pattern to daily quests, though. It was a sort of pattern for regular questing, but got changed because people didn't like going back and forth between the same area and the quest giver.